


with the stars on your shoulders

by rensshi



Category: NCT (Band), WayV (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, M/M, Pining, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-08 11:15:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20834552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensshi/pseuds/rensshi
Summary: Guanheng is a generally optimistic person, but Xuxi was practically born on a silver lining. Carries the hope with him everywhere he goes.Or: they drift in circles around Polaris, on a fragile continuum with little time to get things right.





	with the stars on your shoulders

**Author's Note:**

> for crackle who is in love w/ space and its infinite possibilities.
> 
> hi!! i'm back with so many tears shed. there is truly not enough time or grounds to cover when researching for and writing a space and sci-fi au, so please PLEASE forgive any technical inaccuracies, which i'm sure there are still plenty of.
> 
> edit: there were many grammatical errors and typos and a very small part that i added to make this more coherent but it’s mostly fixed!
> 
> additional warnings, which isn't explicit enough for me to put in the tags but will warn for it here anyway, includes consensual somnophilia in the sexual content. other things i’ll warn for are themes to do with mortality, injuries, mentioned past death.
> 
> enjoy!

你披著星辰來世界頂端 

_ (You came to the top of the world with the sky full of stars on your shoulder)_

🌠

Maybe it starts with this statue of a man with his hands behind his back, smiling up at the big blue sky above. Its polyester and fiber mass used to float in the harbour of Port Vell in Barcelona before half the ocean ate away everything and chewed at the earth’s continents. _ Miraestels _, the statue was called. When Yangyang shows Guanheng a picture of it—more like a picture of Yangyang with his parents on vacation posing for the camera on Rambla del Mar against the sparkling horizon of the sea, Guanheng sees the statue is a cartoon of a figure, blocks for limbs, no detailed features, no clothes. But the figure’s smile was serene and unassuming. How fitting that it floated as a symbol of humanity. 

Miraestels is nowhere to be found now. The Tensha Rift, a phenomenon that marked the end and a beginning, must be responsible for it, having forced seas to shift, islands shrouded in the saltwater. Although with the thoughtless way humans have been sinking the earth, plowing through its core, maybe we got what we deserved, Yangyang said. Mankind was greedy, mankind will never listen, just another one for the history books for another precious generation of how conquering land wasn’t enough. The galaxy was new territory now and with half the resources gone, the nations’ military forces saw the need to build extensions of their armies specifically for space.

In the ship called Shenzhou 3, charting past Canis Major and the Northern Cross, Guanheng writes the word _ miraestels _ on his own palm, not expecting anyone else on the crew to notice before it disappears. Xuxi catches it fading, of all days when he isn’t in the mess hall, reading, or at the training deck.

“It means stargazer,” Guanheng says. He’s not sure if it’s Spanish or Portuguese. He’ll ask Yangyang later in the testing rooms. “Here, I’ll write it for you.” Guanheng etches it onto Xuxi’s wrist in thick whiteboard marker so it curls around.

Xuxi looks so pleased, Guanheng can almost forget that he’s going away again. He never asks for how long though they’ve been adrift for more than a year now—five hundred Earth days on estimate. 

“There’s another mission after we’re done here,” Xuxi says, looking him straight in the eye, like he owes Guanheng something. 

“Right.”

Xuxi marveled at the asteroid belt like it was Christmas come early among the ship’s crew. He pulled Guanheng to join him up on his bunk bed so he could watch the scatter of rocks move and dot the stars behind where they burned.

Now on the ship, massive enough to house the whole Xian-1 Space Force, Guanheng spends most of his time in the officer quarters down in engineering. Other days he’s in the drone control room with Sicheng and Chenle because their company is nice and he can yak their ears off without risking getting his shoulder twisted by say, Renjun. And then, astrometrics; Guanheng never particularly liked astrometry as a subject when they were still students in the academy, always made sure he got the measurements down to the tee so he wouldn’t have to do extra work. 

But the blinking dots, coordinates across the holograms of constellations and the green orbs on the navigation map in the astrometrics room, helped diffuse the quiet anxiety that came with the ticking of time. 

Xuxi’s pile of books isn’t high, but has the strangely satisfying worn quality to them that suggests an almost weirdly religious habit of being picked up and flipped through so often a time. He circles the words he doesn’t know for him to look up. He borrows a clipped copy of a poetry book from Dejun to practice his Mandarin, recites it out loud to Guanheng. Learning languages is a bigger, cherished pride of its own now. Especially due to how someone’s mother tongue becomes more sacred as each day passes while they keep searching, fighting for new life, new homes to make for the people back on earth. Xuxi claims he never used to read that much, laughs at how if his parents could see him now, they’d ask who replaced their son and tackles Guanheng playfully on the floor when Guanheng said it suited him better if he didn’t bother with books. 

But signing up for the academy and essentially sealing away the rest of your youth tied to the large and endless vacuum of space, signing up to fight—meant you were supposed to adjust to the passage of time, prepare yourself to see it go by in the blink of an eye. And yet, everything out here is in slow motion, all consuming and brighter. When that dulls into the black sea like a dying star, you eventually learn to understand in all its atoms and burning compounds, that everything will go lackluster.

So Guanheng writes sometimes to still the buzz of restlessness. He’s grown to like it even if it isn’t for anyone to see, although he envies Dejun for being able to do it really well, like magic. If Dejun wasn’t here, he could have been a songwriter. If only that line of work meant getting by and making bank like it used to do for their parents’ generation. 

“You need the music,” Dejun says, offering Guanheng one earbud connected to his personal tablet. A haunting voice trills in Guanheng’s right ear, the harmonies elevating the woman’s voice to the echoing quality from the walls of the Sistine chapel like Guangheng used to watch in those American action movies set in Europe. Reverent and full of sorrow.

Sometimes the music is enough. Guanheng tends to talk so much when he’s around people he’s comfortable with, that only music can shut him up effectively.

“Talk to me then,” Xuxi suggests one night when Guanheng sneaks into his room again after curfew. They’re both lucky that Na Jaemin, another cadet who shares his room with Xuxi, never rats them out even if Jaemin’s jokes about it keep Xuxi on a leash that isn’t all that short anyway to begin with.

Guanheng glances at Jaemin at the small desk strewn with distorted origami creatures, and his shoulders hunched over an old Batman comic book that he had gotten from a one of the younger Korean kids named Jisung, who probably stole it before he left for the academy. Jaemin’s got his headphones on. 

“You got that much time, Xuxi?” Guanheng half whispers anyway.

“Trust me, I do.” Xuxi smiles and hums, curls his toes against Guanheng’s calf on the bottom bunk of the bed. Nothing ever happens for months on end. The achievements were small victories nonetheless—new metals from Callo, contact with other humans on a new area called Sahanna after they passed the asteroid belt. Guanheng is a generally optimistic person, but Xuxi was practically born on a silver lining. Carries the hope with him everywhere he goes.

When they’d first met, they were still in Beijing at the academy, training to be crew members for the fleet. They were supposed to orbit just a little past Mercury, to touch base on Vratic where the Russians and Ukrainians had their first successful mission and managed to find shit worth using on a not-so-barren new planet.

Guanheng had been sitting in the cafeteria with Renjun and Sicheng, peeling tangerines that could have gone a little more ripe had he waited, cradling his fresh mug of_ bi luo chun _. He felt someone else’s eyes on him from the table across him, behind Renjun. People don’t really forget eyes like Huang Xuxi’s. Guanheng started to realize this when Xuxi squeezed into the seat next to him in class before the lesson started.

“Is there something wrong?” Guanheng asked when Xuxi doesn’t stop looking at Guanheng’s open notebook.

“Nothing. But now there’s something wrong with _ my _notes,” Xuxi says, laughing and embarrassed. The spelling errors glared at Guanheng from Xuxi’s notes, and that made Guanheng laugh too. This reminded him of primary school; the speaking was fine. It was the mix of characters that was jarring, a mind-numbing struggle that Guanheng used to wrestle with in his classes when he moved to Beijing years ago and Mandarin became the medium.

“What’s your name?” Guanheng asked, Cantonese weighing on his tongue light and easy.

Xuxi smiled so bright then that the room, underneath its ugly fluorescence that managed to paint everyone’s skin a dull Vitamin-D deficient pallor, also brightened. “I’m Wong Yukhei.” He’d said it quietly, voice lowered like it was a secret. He was happy to be sharing.

So Guanheng gives Xuxi his name. Not _ Huang Guanheng _but the one he grew up with in return, surrounded by his parents, his sister. It’s an equal trade.

For how lackluster things can get with the steely blues for chroma and the ever-present droning hum of Shenzhou’s life support systems, Guanheng loses himself in what he does easily enough. He likes the routine of it, watching the graphs and bulbs blink. It’s usually clockwork. Check the levers and levels, oxygen to nitrogen from 73 to 27 percent, the muffled tune of _ Claire de lune _ from Kun’s old speakers carrying over from his quarters. The song used to haunt Guanheng in his sleep when he dreams of his family back home, the remnants of the piano tune still tinkering when his eyes flutter awake in the dark of his room.

“Where’s your family now?” Kun asks in the middle of a break from all the reports and graphs in folders in front of him.

“Guangdong, right now,” Guanheng says. The last time he’d called his sister, that was where they were packing up to move to because the landscapes were forming better again, with fertile soils and the air fresher than in Beijing by a hundred times. _ When you return, you’ll see here; we’ll have a new home for you, _ she’d said. It’s the nicest thing Guanheng has heard from her in a while. “What about you, gé?”

“Singapore,” Kun smiles. His eyes are tired, one of those weeks where people aren’t sleeping very well. But there’s still a kindness to his whole demeanor. 

“Oh? Well that’s good.” They were set to be in Singapore once they came back. It’s either you get relieved off duty in different places depending on the mission you were dispatched to, or return to your original base. People moved around a lot anyway when half the world was still a wasteland washed over. Guanheng thinks of his family, doesn’t think he’ll see Beijing again soon.

Kun laughs. “They used to talk about Australia, before the Rift surged the last time. They wanted somewhere with lots of sun.” From their navigation maps of earth, what was left of Australia was a miniscule dot. It had shrunk a third of its size if you zoomed in on the map.

And the sun in all its burning raging splendor was something they avoided on their path up here. 

There is a part of Guanheng who wishes Xuxi didn’t fit into the clothes and the role he was trained for so well for selfish reasons of his own. Reasons that he tries not to think about every time the pilots get into the starfighters and take off from the hangar deck. 

He tells himself it’s selfish to want, maybe wrong even. He used to be painfully aware of how his throat became tight, how his mind skids to a stop, longing in a wreck somewhere on fire when he notices the veins in Xuxi’s arms, the way the muscles in his back shift, tanned skin glistening with a faint sheen of sweat under the hot glare of the bright lights when he changes out of his training gear. But is it really selfish?

It’s easy to want when Xuxi bears his heart openly, when he makes everyone laugh. When Xuxi is sometimes the last person (not counting Dejun as his roommate) Guanheng sees before he sleeps, Xuxi having plucked him in his restless state out of the engineering quarters just before curfew if Kun had already dozed off. Guanheng told himself Xuxi would do the same for anyone. Guanheng would have thought it impossible.

Until he felt like he’d been shot down into a drop pod when Xuxi had had a thing with Ten, one of the other pilots. Stomach plunging, a new bizarre reality crashing when you landed on your ass. 

“I didn’t know you liked”— Guanheng said. 

“Men?” Xuxi finished for him, his tone light but his expression blank at first. He cleared his throat quietly even if the hallways were empty. “Got a problem with that?”

“No, of course not,” Guanheng said quietly. He’d smiled, or what had hoped was a big, reassuring enough smile. Xuxi looked at him up and down and relaxed, laugh lines along his eyes fanning like constellation veins.

Xuxi had gotten praise for being able to ace the final tests for flying a fighter ship. They were beautiful things, faster than sound and Xian-1 could brag about having the best builders and engineers to maintain her, one of the best spaceships from the China Force for engineers to be, really. No deck divisions, the same privileges shared too. Guanheng had gotten pats on the back when they’d graduated the academy, had been told he was good enough to get assigned to the Xian-1 Force but he doesn’t know yet if he wants to be as good as Kun. Guanheng’s heart had soared with relief after his tests, and the high was from validation and fulfillment, not happiness.

“Sure it suits you,” Guanheng said lamely when Xuxi put on the jumpsuit, then the vests, and heavier armor over his torso, clumsy and still fumbling in the training decks.

Xuxi winced. “Now I’d rather think about something else. Like the sun.” He adjusted the rifle strapped properly now against his body. “The sun looks better than any of us.” He’d been talking about the sun when you’re down on earth. Sunshine on a coast, lazy saltwater waves kissing the shore and sand. 

As time passes, the ship inches its way to their destination. It’s a richly purple planet from the observation deck, that grows bigger until they break through the atmosphere to see pools of water and terrains of soil and oddly-colored fauna.

Xuxi wears the uniform over his undershirt and vest, hiding his dog tag. The badge of jagged wings against the bronze sun stays on top of the lighter armor the soldiers put on when they step out, a sign of peace and not offense. Guanheng watches Xuxi’s hands carry the rifle with ease, hands that know the ins and outs of a starfighter and its controls.

There is a wave of pilots below them from where they are on the second floor overlooking the assembly forming and disappearing towards the hangar while Guanheng hurries down to security to check in with the armory, after the AI’s voice through his earpiece gives him the okay status on the engines and capacitors. 

When he’s down by the engines, or the security level, it’s deadly quiet after the hiss and shudder of the ship after the starfighters have taken off from the hangar. Kun keeps _ Claire de lune _playing if not Faye Wong and Wang Lee Hom’s old OSTs through the smooth sound system, not his old speakers. 

The whole time, Guanheng’s fingers habitually find his dog tag, tucks it away with his family name underneath the numbers hanging around his neck as if to make sure it’s still there underneath the collar. His father gave him a heavy watch, rich alloy comprised of a number of metals that was ironically called ‘metallic glass’ on his thirteenth birthday. He keeps it in the pocket of his jumpsuit at all times, likes the sturdy weight of it. His father had almost taken back the gift when Guanheng told them he that he would be leaving to train for the Space Corps because his father had been afraid it would come back to him too soon without Guanheng himself.

The droids roll back new shipments of metals to take back to Earth, the levels controlled so they don’t reap too much of what never truly felt like theirs, even though there was no other intelligent life force on Vratic before humans landed.

The soldiers who patrol the shipments wear masks because the air is too thick. Their faces are bathed under a ghostly blue light, as they walk around the ship.

The pilots are off duty now. Guanheng tilts his head to look at the new tattoo Xuxi uncovers on underneath his collarbone that spans a little over the swell of his right shoulder. The skin around the script and the beautiful curved lines is still healing.

“You liked the word that much?”

“Ten asked me what it meant when I went to him to get it. I told him you taught me the word,” Xuxi says, cheeks reddening.

_ Miraestels _was in Catalan, to be exact, a language still spoken in parts of Spain and Southern France. 

“I kept thinking about the statue, and how in his hands behind his back, he’s holding a star while he smiles up at the sky. I like that. It’s like the idea of his own Polaris, you know?”

Guanheng had almost forgotten that one significant tiny detail about the statue. Polaris was what hypnotized compass needles to point towards it, but everyone has talked about their own Polaris and their North Star.

“What does Polaris mean for you?” Guanheng asks.

Xuxi smiles wry at his shirt bunched up in his hands, makes to put it on. He answers, “To see the sun again,” in a thoughtful, pensive tone, dropping eye contact.

Guanheng doesn’t push for answers further.

With the mission on Vratic complete, they were on their return journey back. It’s normal for one’s sense of time to start becoming shoddy when you’re up here for too long. 

The journey back would take another eleven months going the safe route. It’s still surprising and much too soon to Guanheng, when Xuxi comes by his room after a couple of weeks with a book that he hands to Guanheng slowly, like he’s trying to be discreet.

“I managed to buy off a copy from Mark,” Xuxi smiles when Guanheng runs his fingers over the embossed print of the words _ Journey to the Center of the Earth _ in awe.

“What did you bribe him with?”

“Catcher In The Rye,” Xuxi says, no regrets. Xuxi picked that up and stopped halfway, slotting Holden Caulfield’s sorry ass down at the bottom of the pile.

They end up in the hallways going down to engineering, heading to the officer quarters, the room where Kun keeps the space food, tea bags, a kettle and his card decks. Kun is surprised to see them when he opens the door after they knock but lets them in anyway. Guanheng stops inspecting the decks, gives up again on trying to figure out the secrets to Kun’s magic tricks with the cards.

By the time they’ve finished most of their tea, it’s past curfew, although no one really seems to care anymore, lax on their return home. 

Once Kun leaves the room, Xuxi clears the table, gathering the mugs in his hands and setting them under the tap water when Guanheng makes to wash his own mug.

It’s suddenly quiet. Not the silence that comes when they’re sitting on the scaffolding near the observation deck and looking up at the black canvas and stars around them, or the silence that comes when Dejun is singing and one of them is reading.

“I’ve been thinking about what I want to do when we land,” Xuxi starts to say, the low thrum of his voice bringing a shuddering stillness to the room.

“Let me guess. You want to see the beach,” Guanheng says, drumming his knuckles on the table restlessly. Singapore was supposed to be good. The small country was now locked down with an invisible domed shield ingeniously overlooking the towering high-rise flats and the brave souls over at the hub by Marina Bay studying the damn Rift. _ The place has everything including a beach. Can you believe that? _ Xuxi exclaimed at lunch the other day, hushed and so excited that Renjun and Chenle started ticking off everything they wanted to do, relieved to be returning. 

“Yeah. Come with me?” Xuxi asks.

“Sure.” Guanheng’s distracted a bit by the new markings on the side of the table; probably Ten’s work—drawing of a happy pig in a grown out buzzcut and a middle finger next to it by Kun.

He looks up to find panic washing over Xuxi’s face before he goes blank. “Will you come with me?” Xuxi asks again.

“I’ll go. What’s up? You never had to ask me to do shit before,” Guanheng laughs. His voice falters when Xuxi ducks his head in embarrassment, his back still turned toward him while he dries the mugs. The tips of his ears have gone from pink to red now.

“I felt like I had to ask,” Xuxi explains, turning around. He grimaces at a spot over Guanheng’s head. “No, I mean I should ask.”

Guanheng should have known, should have seen this coming. He didn’t expect it to actually happen so soon but time in space is a traitorous thing. 

_ No no no, don’t say it. Shut up shut up shut up. _The thoughts are like pinballs in Guanheng’s skull.

“I like you,” Xuxi murmurs, effectively stopping time and causing an implosion in Guanheng’s ribcage. “I’ve liked you for a while now.”

Guanheng turns away, palms on his knees, getting ready to stand up. What he really intends to do is run, out and up, up away to somewhere safe where he can think, like the observation deck, or the hangar. All his safe spots on the ship are shared with Xuxi though. His body falters in the movement and he stays in his seat.

“I—You can’t do that,” Guanheng says, his tone coming out more clipped than he means to.

“I”— the confusion in Xuxi’s expression makes him look astonished in a way that Guanheng would have found funny had it been other circumstances. “I just wanted to tell you. I need to,” Xuxi emphasizes, even more quietly. “Are you going to walk out?”

“No,” Guanheng decides, honestly wishing he still could if it meant saving himself from the trouble of this, the fulfilled reality of being loved back by another person he might only know through radio transmissions in the next years to come. “You’re making this difficult, is all,” Guanheng mutters.

Xuxi frowns, takes the seat across the table. “How?”

Guanheng laughs, no humor. “Because now I’m going to have to wait.” Guanheng entertains the thought of punching Xuxi in the stomach with how fucking clueless he looks so Guanheng just laughs again. “I’m gonna have to wait for you to come back when you leave again. It’s going to hurt a little more this time,” Guanheng clarifies. _ But I’d still wait anyway. _

Xuxi’s eyes go wide and the realization hits him. “Oh.” He just says, staring at Guanheng, unmoving. “Oh. Okay.” 

They’re all the same, the people here. Others waiting on them back home, waiting to see them again. Guanheng signed up to be here even when his parents disapproved at first. Xuxi signed up _ because _of filial piety even if Xuxi’s father was no longer alive after the Rift unleashed a destructive tsunami over the coast of Hong Kong when Xuxi had been eight years old. If anything, losing one parent only made Xuxi’s resolve stronger—evident from the characters of his family name on his left upper arm and the white jade pendant that sits on his bedside, one of the gifts his father had given to his mother after they married. She had let him have it in her mourning grief, couldn’t bear to look at it every time she got up to to try to fix her hair in the morning, Xuxi had told Guanheng. 

Filial piety was the same thing that made Guanheng call his parents again during his time in the academy to tell them he was okay and he’s been eating well and letting his mother know that the congee here would never top hers. 

Either way, all of them were just trying to save a past, a present and future. And another love, _ this _ kind of bone-deep ache that was almost healing and made Guanheng feel better on days when he couldn’t focus, is something that might be scarily permanent among all things temporal. It’s crept up over the years ever since they were still recruits at the academy, the kind that Guanheng has tried to tamp down and suppress by calling it admiration, taking a leaf from the oldest trick in the book by trying to convince himself what he feels for Xuxi is _ brotherly _of all things, which obviously didn’t work. Everywhere Xuxi goes, the air is on high frequency, a signal Guanheng is just drawn to. 

This time, the frequency seems to shatter the air around Guanheng’s head, his voice sounding fractal and disjointed when he says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. I get it,” Xuxi says, waving a hand, his voice unaffected although his eyes say a lot.

Guanheng peels apart the pages of his journal, the one he forgot he’d written in not long before:

_ My name is Wong Kunhang. Last week I had my twentieth birthday. But if I weren’t here, I would have been twenty two. Somehow I think that’s pretty funny. _

_ Kun ge taught me how to do one card trick. He’s greedy and won’t show me anything else. Yukhei asked me about my North Star. I haven’t given him an answer yet. _

Guanheng falls asleep with sun behind his eyelids filtering through white clouds in the sky.

He definitely has nightmares about open bodies of water, about drowning. There were other nightmares about being engulfed by a blackhole, his eyes never opening to see light besides the flashing red emergency ones. His other nightmares were the water. It’s not an uncommon thing, not enough for him to go see doctors. But enough for him to feel like the sand might disappear beneath his feet when he looks out onto the sea, and he chooses instead to sit first, staring out onto the water the last time he'd ever seen the sea.

It’s a miracle they even kept the beach here since there weren’t many islands left. If they’d gone to China, there was still Xiamen. The coast along Qingdao. Fairly safe ever since it was decided that beaches be preserved with domed shields if governments wanted to put money into it. Otherwise the coastlines would just have to risk the mood swings of the Tensha Rift.

Unlike Beijing, June is not as stiflingly hot in Singapore. There’s still so much sweat clinging on to his skin, humid warmth both disorienting and soothing after he’d been stuck in a vessel floating in space for the past four years. In Beijing though, in the middle of the year, the sweat from combat practice almost never dries off when the AC breaks down.

“It’s weird how they destroyed the statue of the Merlion before the Rift could take it. Like they knew all those years ago and wanted to demolish it on their own terms,” Dejun says looking out at the skyline of where Sentosa used to show off its attractions. From here through the window on the top floor of their base, all they can see are shiny new transparent buildings dedicated to more research.

Guanheng can sense Dejun looking at him from his periphery so he turns, gestures wordlessly to get Dejun to say what he wants to.

“You’re trying too hard to be smart,” Dejun says slowly.

“What are you talking about?”

Dejun rolls his eyes. “There’s a difference between being scared all the time and being smart.”

Guanheng crosses his arms, tries to roll back the stiffness in his shoulders. “So which is better?” He doesn’t think either of them are better than the other but he still would like to hear Dejun’s answer.

“Well, no one can help being scared. I don’t think you should worry about how that makes you look,” Dejun replies and Guanheng clicks his tongue.

“Wow that is not the answer I was hoping for.”

“You know that isn’t cryptic,” Dejun laughs and Guanheng smiles as he pushes past him, shoulders colliding deliberately with Dejun. For all of Dejun’s written prose and poetry that spending all that time up in Shenzhou ship subjected him to, the prose that makes Xuxi’s eyes go glassy and his head bob up and down in vague (feigned) understanding like a bobblehead, he isn’t cryptic.

Guanheng walks with Johnny and Chenle to the morning market. Chenle follows Johnny around everywhere like an eager puppy, something he’d had always been hilariously wary about at first but warmed up to. Now Johnny looks behind his back to make sure Chenle isn’t holding winding conversations with the old aunties at the pear stall, and Guanheng nudges at him, prodding at the small of his back to get him to keep moving as they wave goodbye to the old ladies, fruits in bags.

“I didn’t know you liked these. Are they your favorite?” Chenle grabs hold of the bag that Guanheng is carrying, weighs it with his own hand. “Ge, you bought so much,” he says incredulously.

Guanheng can’t even fucking finish a quarter kilo of grapes or a kilo of apples by himself without them going bad—veggies in his diet were good enough.

He knocks on the door on the floor he’s been avoiding ever since they landed, and when the door opens, Xuxi’s eyes are so wide that Guanheng almost laughs at him.

“What are you doing here?” Xuxi eyes the bags. “Wait, you went to the market without me?” It comes out disappointed, endearingly so.

“You’re in luck—I bought so much because I wanted to share,” Guanheng grins, and then swallows. “These are really for you,” Guanheng plainly admits, holding out the bag of mangoes and doing his best to keep his arm steady as he asks, “Is it too late to say that I was stupid?”

Now it’s Xuxi who isn’t trying to smile; cheeks puffed and lips fighting to keep it in. “You’re plenty stupid all the time,” Xuxi says.

“Asshole.” 

Guanheng doesn’t need to push past him because Xuxi steps aside for him to enter. Here at this base with quite a number of the crew back to Beijing, the numbers have dwindled enough for each of them to have their own room. He doesn’t know what to expect in Xuxi’s room. But there’s his thin sweater and jacket hanging off the one hook on the wall, valuables strewn on the bedside carelessly, flat pillow flung at the end of the bed because he’d grown accustomed to sleeping without one under his head in favor of hugging it.

“You know, all I wanted was to spend a day with you,” Xuxi begins, probably meaning to sound accusatory or mad but Guanheng can hear his smile before he even sees it when he turns around.

“I’m sorry. I meant it when I said I wanted to go to the goddamn beach alright?” Guanheng laughs, not recognizing how his own voice comes so _ fond _as he steps backwards. He feels his heart skip when Xuxi steps forward, eyes crinkled at the corners with warmth.

They used to submerge themselves in water to train like the astronauts do. Guanheng swears he goes underwater when the gentle hum of the AC fades out like water pressurizing his chest and his head, when Xuxi puts a hand on his cheek. Guanheng leans into it right away.

Their first kiss is clumsy and way too quick but it’s enough for Guanheng to hold onto Xuxi’s wrists when he makes to let go of Guanheng’s shoulders.

Xuxi catches on quickly, and his smile is shy this time. “Do you want to try again?”

Guanheng presses his lips together to keep from laughing because if he does, he might not stop. “Please,” he says, looking up at Xuxi straight on. He closes his eyes again when Xuxi tilts his chin upwards with his hand.

  


Xuxi shows up at Guanheng’s room five o’clock on the dot with a small bag of longan and rambutan that Johnny managed to get for a good bargain at the nearest market.

“They’re in season,” Xuxi says, handing a rambutan to Guanheng. “Don’t judge. Try it,” Xuxi laughs when Guanheng grimaces. 

“Later,” Guanheng says, batting his arm away.

It’s sweet, the juice bursting in his mouth when he bites into the white flesh. They didn’t sell rambutan like they used to in Beijing and even then, it was rare when the temperatures dropped to its lowest in Hainan when the world fell, which was the only place in China that could grow them. These fruits were a good sign that things were truly getting better despite the Rift. People were helping each other, they were coping, even if the general landscape of things were still considered bleak.

They sit at the nearby night hawker center, the chatter of civilians louder than the hiss of woks and meat sizzling. It’s an open hawker center, under the night sky where the stars can barely be seen over the light pollution so the smoke isn’t thick but the smell still clings onto their clothes and hair. They have wanton noodles and Guanheng almost cries with how good it tastes after years of eating bland food. He nearly snorts up his mouthful when he sees Xuxi’s eyes watering, shiny with emotion as he rolls his eyes back and closes them. There’s not much room for talking when they’re both shoving _orh lua _and curry puffs down their mouths.

“If you wanted to go night swimming at the beach, then this is probably a bad idea,” Guanheng manages to say around a mouthful of food.

Xuxi hums. “I never said I’d take you swimming.” He wipes his mouth with a napkin, crushes the tissue into a ball. “I’d like to, really. But not now,” Xuxi says softly, his eyes falling onto his empty plate.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Guanheng says, which makes Xuxi grin immediately, ducking under his hand over his mouth. The reaction makes Guanheng’s chest go funny, and it’s suddenly hotter under his shirt. He’s thankful that he’s sitting against the harsh light from the hawker stalls, so Xuxi can’t see if he’s gone pink. It makes Xuxi that much brighter though, and that’s somehow worse for Guanheng.

They walk down the pavement that slopes downward until they see the horizon against the inky night sky behind the greenery. They’ve been awfully shy about physical contact for two people who’ve grown up having sparred with each other for basic combat training, friends who sat with each other all the time for meals, who squeezed into one bed growing up, playfully kicking at each other and arguing over mind-numbing matters when they got bored of their books. Xuxi walks with his hands in his jeans pockets, keeping an inch of distance as he rambles about who he’d caught Jaemin with in one of the break rooms, how his mother used to make lychee juice in the summer for him and his baby brother.

“How many dates have you gone on?” Guanheng asks. 

“If I counted a playground date in kindergarten with a girl whose name I can’t remember? Then three,” Xuxi says, shrugging. Guanheng was there when Wang Yiren from the medical department said yes to Xuxi asking her out in front of her friends. Yiren’s back in Beijing by now, from what Guanheng has heard.

By the time they’re plodding on the sand, taking their shoes off and sinking their bare feet in, Guanheng shoves at Xuxi from behind just to spite him and sure enough, he takes off after Guanheng, yelling and laughing over the rush of waves against the shore. They’re twenty-four by Earth years, but their time in space means their bodies are still on the cusp of twenty. And Guanheng feels younger still, when Xuxi catches up with him as expected, his long legs built leaner and stronger even when they were scrawny fifteen-year-olds joining in sparring matches at combat practice against their future crew members.

The night air is pleasantly cool. Xuxi’s warmth when they collide against each other sets Guanheng’s back prickling. They get sand on their clothes when they fall, Xuxi’s face planted into Guanheng’s chest with a loud yelp and Guanheng’s stomach hurts from being out of breath with laughter.

When Xuxi raises his head, Guanheng kisses him. Not perfectly square on the mouth from their awkward position but Xuxi lifts himself up on his hands to tilt his head, and then it’s perfect. Guanheng opens his mouth to let Xuxi kiss him deeper, the tang of the spices still faint between them but he doesn’t care. _ I hope you know, I hope you know that this is important to me. _

“I like you too, you know that?” Guanheng says against his lips. “I like you so much.”

Guanheng doesn’t know what he did in his past lives to deserve the way Xuxi looks at him. He suddenly wishes they’d gone to the beach during the day. He can drink in the sight of it without being discreet, picture how devastatingly heartbreaking it might be to see him under sunshine, smiling and holding out his hand for Guanheng to take and steady him up on his feet.

Xuxi spends more time with the other pilots and Captain Zhang these days, and Guanheng keeps his head down when he’s in and out of Shenzhou, checking her systems and the power. He keeps his head down so diligently that he’s gone on to checking security headquarters in relation to the shields. 

He feels Kun’s eyes boring into his back as he does it.

“Take it easy,” Kun murmurs before Guanheng can ask. “You aren’t doing everything yourself, remember that.”

Guanheng gapes at him. “Aren’t you visiting home tomorrow?”

“Yeah I am,” Kun affirms, and it’s both fulfilled and weary when he sighs after he says it, looks Guanheng up and down. “It’s weird but I’m nervous about it.”

_ Better home than here _, Guanheng wants to say but he can’t bring himself to, for some reason.

There are a few things to be said in between the pause as they look at each other, but Kun holds out his hand and pulls him into a one-armed strong hug. And Guanheng is glad because if they’d tried to say anything, he’s sure one them will ruin it.

“Ungrateful. That’ll be _ you _,” Kun laughs, clapping him on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

The machines hum behind them in idle agreement, the open visual of the ship model’s hologram file open and glowing off of Kun’s face in the half-lit room.

“Of course,” Guanheng says, and Kun’s dimpled smile shows. “Come back soon, and good luck, ge.”

If their bodies fell through space, and the vacuum of it ate them whole, molecules crushed and atoms breaking apart, maybe they’d join the stars and make bigger constellations. There’s a myth about that somewhere, Yangyang has told him before, about people becoming part of the stars when they died, a concept rehashed over and over in stories.

There’s a statue of Buddha and Kuan Yin in Guanheng’s room, the Buddha being Dejun’s. If anyone else asked if Guanheng still believed in heaven, he would have said yes. It’s easy to believe when everything but the soul and what it carries already exist in limbo.

The biggest factor you had to throw in is time. If it wasn’t space that could swallow you whole, it’s always time.

Guanheng’s room is bare now, having cleared out his belongings. He’d taken the clothes, shoes, journal, valuables, heavy watch and tiny Kuan Yin statue weighing down one of the bags. His military jacket still draped over the rickety chair in the corner of the room where his things were divided into two bags.

Some time ago back up on the ship, he’d been looking over the map alone while Dejun was asleep, holographic brightness of it in the dim lamp light glowing off his skin as he swiped to where the Milky Way was condensed the most. He stares at the constellations first, patterned around the spill of dwarf planets there and gauges the distance. The first thing anyone learns here is that an estimate of a two-year excursion could easily stretch on into three, five or more depending on a number of circumstances too many for one to count on their fingers. Other than blackholes, which should be easy enough to avoid, there’s the matter of your crew resources being exhausted because of the new blackholes that come up. Or humans (more droids than humans in numbers) who are trying to build something out of the planet they’re on, desperate to keep it to themselves. 

The night before, Guanheng had gotten a call from home.

“I’ll prepare _ hong dau saa _for you. The dim sum here too is just as good as before,” his mother assured him. He ducked his head out of the frame of the screen in case actual tears came out of his stinging eyes in front of his parents, deflecting any opportunity for his sister to tease him through the video call.

Tonight, the air seems to press on all sides of him and makes his heart thrum faster when there’s a familiar knock on his door.

Guanheng pulls Xuxi by the hand into his room. Xuxi’s looking at the blue jacket on the chair, eyes trailing over his bags without a word. Guanheng doesn’t trust himself to say anything either with Xuxi pressing his lips on the side of his head, running fingers through the crown of his hair.

In some ways, the past three weeks were dream-like. Everything plunged into a secret haze, the same slow motion trance that drifting in a vessel across the universe had. But even the universe in all its marvelous sweeping obscurity and hidden planets was as real as anything. 

Xuxi kisses Guanheng with an unspoken promise, asks him where he wants it, how does he want i. Guanheng doesn’t want this feeling to disappear the way dreams fade out like a light dying. He pays attention to Xuxi’s mouth, wet and hot down his neck, the shadows casted over the dim room rippling over his firm limbs fucking carved out of bronze that Guanheng digs his nails into to ground himself. Keeps his mouth on Xuxi’s to memorize how he tastes, how bitten Xuxi’s lips already are as he licks down Guanheng’s chest, over the tough dip in his stomach running toward his pelvis. Guanheng keeps his eyes open this time, not closed like he usually does with his head thrown back whenever Xuxi’s mouth slides down over his cock, hot, tight and deliberate. He pulls harder at Xuxi’s hair and Xuxi moans around his cock, pretty lashes fluttering.

“I don’t wanna come yet,” Guanheng tells him, groaning when he sees Xuxi’s mouth after he slides off, lips shiny and splotched with red.

When he fucks into Guanheng, it’s slow. Xuxi presses his face into Guanheng’s neck, his breath hot on his skin, teeth catching before Guanheng tugs gently at Xuxi’s hair again to lift up his head and kiss him rough and open-mouthed.

Guanheng wonders how stiff and aching, how wet the head his cock will be later on after years of not being able to have Xuxi like this. The precum is obvious, stickiness smeared over his stomach and Xuxi smirked the first time he noticed how wet Guanheng could get, said something goddamn annoying along the lines of _ is that how much you want it? _Guanheng can probably imagine how the ache would be like after years, and—with Xuxi fucking him with long hard strokes like Guanheng needs—the thought implodes within him with a pang when he finally comes. 

Because he’s fairly certain he’s never going to not want this. 

He likes the way Xuxi is conscious about being gentle no matter how rough his palms were from holding weaponry over the years. He’ll want Xuxi with him and next to him for every tomorrow that comes.

His heart constricts when Xuxi is pliant on his back, his eyes so very dark, completely vulnerable and tender with sleep still thick in his mouth. He whimpers _ please _ when Guanheng keeps touching, scratching lightly, teasing. Obediently keeps his hands splayed on the small of Guanheng’s back. 

Guanheng sinks down on his cock and starts to ride him. He’d been unbelievably hard and sensitive to Guanheng’s fingers over his hip bones, his tongue on Xuxi’s cock in the early morning while he was just waking. It only makes Xuxi desperate, gasping _ don’t stop _until he comes first beneath Guanheng.

Guanheng watches Xuxi as the orgasm shakes through him, his nails leaving marks on Guanheng’s hips, can fucking _ feel _ him throbbing inside his ass. He thumbs the head of his own cock, hissing until Xuxi replaces Guanheng’s hand with his. Guanheng lets it wash over him, morning light falling onto the bed over them, Xuxi’s eyelashes brown and delicate under the soft dawn and swirls of dust. Xuxi tells him how good Guanheng is for him. Calls him beautiful and _ mine _ and _ love _ throughout until he strokes Guanheng to the edge, white stars on the edge of his vision, a glittering nebula that blinks out as quickly as it pulses through him behind closed eyes.

Where they travel outwards again back up, around the Milky Way has a station situated on Callo, a place the crew before them had already visited half a decade ago. Guanheng counts off five hundred and eighty two days this time.

He counts off four more Earth days where they stay on the station at Callo, mist and fog on the terrain making it hard to see from the gases spurting out continuously from craters. They stop gathering metals, so the pilots fly out to neighboring planets. It should have been clockwork, not timed down to each minute because gravity and time moved up here differently.

Again, it’s eerily quiet on the lower levels where he’s at and just this once, he comes up earlier than he does while Kun is watching the levels and there are personnel and some of the crew running past him in the hallways.

There’s shouting, harried mentions of a shield, meant to really keep things out rather than in—a crueler, much violent version of Earth and its nations’ shields—one starfighter down, no injuries according to Mark through the comms. This shield isn’t magnetic, but it short circuits everything that comes into contact with it , enough to set a part of a starfighter ship in flames.

A week ago, there’d been a sign, flickers of it like a candle, where Yangyang up in navigation had been fiddling around and studying routes and in turn, terrains of Callo. The fog had been predicted. But so had the buzzing dome of electricity that flickered for a fraction of a second in the neighboring planet of Zenul thrice in mere minutes. It happens again the next day, and again the next before it stops completely, the timing of it all too irregular. A drone they sent in after Yangyang’s report managed to land on Zenul, safe and sound.

“We’ll send in the drones first,” their Commander had said. “Until we get more data on how thick that thing is, then it's the drones.”

Guanheng doesn’t feel his feet anymore; rather hears his own dull thudding footsteps when he catches up to Johnny, who startles, eyes wild when Guanheng grabs him by the forearm.

“Who was it?” Guanheng asks urgently, desperately.

Any emotion in Johnny’s face just flatlines when he answers, “Ten,” and he doesn’t stop Guanheng from following him to the drone control room.

“They’ve re-routed, most of them managed to steer clear of the shield. The drones gave Ten a heads up—they’re completely wiped out. But Ten and the others acted quick enough and practically skidded into the thing,” Sicheng explains, striding around a console, eyes sweeping over the red bleeding onto the screens, the blinking pixels that Guanheng can’t stop looking at. The shield is thicker than a heavy bobbing glacier, and apparently so sensitive to anything coming within a mere twenty, thirty feet that it hadn't been just Ten who'd gotten caught in its force.

The feeling of being submerged comes back, head completely under with an eerie disconcerting pressure over his ears and on top. There's someone who holds by the shoulder, tries to steer him to get them to talk to them, and he sees it's Kun, having followed him way up here, Dejun on his heels. But he can't hear them speaking at all. The Admiral’s disembodied voice diffuses through over communications, bizarre and metallic. _ Li Yongqin, Luo Zai Min, _ and _ Huang Xuxi _losing contact with the rest of the fleet when their fighter ships crash is all he hears.

Three hundred days into the last journey to Vratic, Guanheng rips off a page from his journal. He figures he doesn’t need to write this down to remember:

_ My name is Wong Kunhang. When I die, I don't want it to be up here. _

_Someone told me that he wouldn’t mind dying up here surrounded by stars. I thought he was just being noble for the sake of it. But maybe it’s because he’s lost someone he loves to the Rift. It's strange, how he still likes the sand and shore. We’re too busy worrying about the Earth taking us that we’d rather look up to the sky. _

This is a recurring dream:

His parents greet him with tears, and Guanheng truly cries this time, silent tears that his mother wipes away for him. It rains often in Guangdong despite the sunshine, and they forgot to check the weather today, which means that they run in the light shower of rain, only half of Guanheng’s arm still dry and the other side of his body dripping when he gets into the car apologetically, sitting on old newspapers and kitchen towels.

This isn’t Macau, but a place his family now calls him home that he’ll have to fit into his definition of, not that he minds. His mother used the same detergent, the smell of the laundry wafting through the house after it comes out of the beeping dryer. The egg tarts, chilled and straight from the fridge, still tasted as good the more you ate, with the texture of the crust and its ratio to the egg just perfect.

Guanheng meets the other one he’s been wanting to see the most; they’d adopted a growing kitten his dad just started calling Mimi. She sits around beside his bed, pawing at the things he unpacks, and tries to paw at something, the metal clinking sounds making him turn around. This is the most unrealistic thing about this dream; his father was allergic to cats and would never get one.

He clicks his tongue and sets her gently on his bed, away from the mess and away from the chain with the dog tag attached to it. His dog tag is the same; tiny scratches around the number at the back but he digs his fingers against the new thin groove in it now around the edges. Guanheng carefully keeps his dog tag in a bottom drawer somewhere, underneath old clothes before he lets Mimi out of the room.

And then Guanheng wakes up with a jerk, a blooming sore and crick in his back and neck.

Xuxi is awake in front of him on the infirmary bed, has been awake since god knows when, unable to sleep. The morphine has worn off and his eyes are clearer, heavy-lidded with an emotion he can’t place.

“You should get proper rest,” Xuxi mumbles, his voice scratchy. “You need it.”

Guanheng looks at the scars on Xuxi’s right hand, sits up straighter in his seat. “I’m not the one who looks horrible.”

That makes Xuxi smile in spite of himself, bruised cheekbones that were fading, ointment caked on his neck under the gauze over his left ear. When Xuxi had woken up the first time, he hadn't been able to hear very well. The chances of him getting relieved were high, complete with a medal of bravery maybe.

“I heard what happened,” Guanheng finally says, the deep breath he’d taken coming out like a sigh.

When Xuxi tries to smile, Guanheng feels the bristles of anger already. “Mark is guilty as hell, Yukhei. You got to the shield before he did, tried to play the hero—” he stops, looks away from Xuxi’s now sullen expression, hardening steel of defiance in his eyes.

“Well I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

For a minute, there's just the sound of them breathing, and the drone of the machines and IV drip. In another room, Jaemin is still unconscious. Guanheng had visited Ten earlier in his room, his mouth quirking up in a small smile, words slurring when he spoke due to the morphine intake.

Guanheng pulls out his dog tag from inside his pocket. Xuxi's expression becomes weary, a white flag of his own and all of Guanheng’s anger almost dissipates. “Then what is this?” He asks, voice steady this time. Xuxi had it encrypted with an audio file, meant for Guanheng to listen to five years later. If he’d still mean anything to Guanheng by then. Guanheng scoffed, took the tag back wordlessly and kept it next to his father's watch in his pocket, the fading warmth of it felt against the leg. Xuxi will always mean something to him, forever.

Xuxi looks away, his face scrunched up in regret. “Did you listen to the message?”

“No. I was banking on you living. Time capsule message, my ass,” Guanheng mutters but it’s softer. The longer he has his hand closed around his dog tag, the metal warm from his palm, the better he feels.

Xuxi’s mouth twitches into a ghost of a smile, reaching his eyes first before it disappears. “I’m sorry.”

They'd always known how this could disappear anytime. The sun, the ground they used to walk on, the friends they’ve made and people they left waiting. They only hope to be remembered once they’re gone.

Guanheng finally opens his palm, wears the chain around his neck like he usually did before. His fingers clutch at the sheets, careful not to press against the part of Xuxi's ribs still healing when he kisses him on the forehead.

_(“Kunhang, if you’re hearing this message, then well—maybe things are okay. Maybe this isn’t what you want to hear right now. Maybe you’re angry too. I was only thinking—of being able to have you around for a day longer. One more day, after another._

_I know it's hard to hold on to anything these days. But you were one more thing I wanted to keep around._

_I thought about the North Star a lot. I wanted it to be you. It's always you.”)_

**Author's Note:**

> quote at the beginning and the title was taken from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e76qTrz6PlI)
> 
> this is a [playlist/soundtrack list](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3U4f9bxdpGQiZscshAeXuh?si=-inMQokZTwyp_sfz90-Zwg) to listen to, that i've written along to on repeat for a huge part of this fic.
> 
> comments and kudos appreciated! hmu on my [twitter](https://twitter.com/fractalkiss) or cc @fractalkiss if u want to yell at me abt wayv or anything else!


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